


idealism sits in prison.

by juregim



Series: the revolution will not be televised [2]
Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Basically everyone and a few ocs - Freeform, Ben’s motion never passed, Darker Than Disney Canon, Gang politics, Isle of the Lost (Disney) is a Terrible Place, King Beast is disgusting, Multi, Rebellion, alternative universe, tags to be added as story progresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:21:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23128486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juregim/pseuds/juregim
Summary: What has Auradon done to deserve her loyalty except send her people to the Isle? Tomiris is one of the last Huns free. And she will get revenge.
Relationships: Evie/Jay/Mal/Carlos de Vil, Evie/Jay/Mal/Carlos de Vil/Tomiris, Gil Harry Uma
Series: the revolution will not be televised [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1472345
Kudos: 23





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had this idea for like 6 months. A darker, more realistic Auradon, a new villain, exploration of oppressive systems. 
> 
> I have some information on the AU on my tumblr @Lsleofthelost under the trwnbt tag.
> 
> I do hope you enjoy.
> 
> Content warning for this chapter, check out end notes.

The mission was fairly straightforward: infiltrate the High Royal Court as a maid, get noticed by King Beast and poison him. It was known, if rarely talked about, to certain royal families and those affiliated that King Adam was generous with his affections; it would have been easy to make it look like a fit of jealousy from Queen Belle. After that, Ben, the King-in-waiting, who is young (barely twenty) and therefore easily manipulated, would become the High King. 

Choosing the agent out of volunteers was tricky. Several factors had to be weighed. In the end they decided on Tomiris. Firstly, just in case they get caught, she is human. When protesting the anti-magic laws, it’s always better if the active party is human, otherwise they just get called extremists. Secondly, she was pretty enough. King Adam has spent far too long in the beast form and he so easily fell prey to human pleasures, enjoying the company of many women (but not his wife, not after the heir) in his bed. And she was close to his type, with long deep brown hair, brown eyes and just non-Auradonian enough to be “interesting” and “exotic”. She was the perfect age that it was believable that she did have enough experience to be hired (forged recommendation letters, of course) but not so much that she be put in administration. And, most importantly, she had no traceable connection to the rebellion or any of her crimes. Sure, she didn’t have any experience in long missions, but she was passionate about the cause and hated the UKA High King with searing passion. 

King Beast’s council was the reason only a handful of Hun families were free. They were the ones who decided to condemn an entire nation to rot on the Isle. The soldiers coming to “liberate” the village she lived in and round up the remaining Huns were wearing the Villeneuve crest. Tomiris will never forget her father shaking her awake in the middle of the night, telling her to put on the travelling clothes. She was barely ten, but she saw the terror in her father’s eyes when he said that the scout reported the Auradon army approaching. She will never forgive the King for infecting her life with fear of being found (forcing them to constantly move), for taking away all her family, except her father (who would probably fare better on the Isle), for never thinking twice about it (they just gave Hun territory to Wei and made it the Emperor’s headache). 

Tomiris knew she wasn’t the only one hurt by the Crown. She heard whispers of a resistance. They called themselves the Silver Wings and it took her some time to find them without her father knowing, but she did. The Silver Wings saw a brighter future, one where magic flourished and Auradon wasn’t exploiting the world, but they weren’t delusional, they knew that it would be achieved by simply wishing and being “good”. She joined them at sixteen, and three years later she is their best assassin. 

So that’s why she’s here, looking like a picture perfect candidate. Her long dark hair is kept away from her face with two braids, the face itself is clear, with only the lightest makeup on. She is dressed modestly in black straight pants and soft ochre sweater. The only things of note are her combat boots and snake-ornamented rings (could be explained by her cover persona’s background). 

She is getting an instructional tour by the head maid (Lumette? Plunette? something along those lines), half paying attention to what the woman is saying and half-casing the place, noting the exits and cameras. She wasn’t going to work in the kitchens anyway, she will be in the cleaning crew. The kitchen is where Tomiris will be getting firewood and bringing trash, so it’s the last stop of the tour. 

“Do you have any questions, Mariam?” A fake name, of course. 

“Uh, not really, I don’t think.”

“Don’t be so nervous, girl, your first few days you will be partnered with someone, Julie, probably, she’ll explain anything I didn’t. If you get along, we’ll make that partnership permanent.” Lunette (?) smiles at her, and it’s tired but genuine. “Well, we’re done with the tour, but if you come sit with me, I would want to talk.”

(“Be friendly with other staff. Some of them will hate you when you start being with the Beast, because it will be impossible to hide. Everyone involved in court will know his favourite. But if you’re well liked around the castle, people aren’t going to suspect you in the end. Play the innocent girl, who by fate has wandered so far from home in Wei.”)

“Of course, madame!”

Lu (that’s easier to remember) goes into some tiny tea room, just off the kitchen staff exit. On her way in, she taps a worker on a shoulder, and he runs off to prepare tea. Nothing about the head maid is aggressive or confrontational; she really seems to want to get to know her new employee better. 

Nevertheless, Tomiris is nervous. She was nervous the whole time but this is when it really gets to her. 

“So, I have to ask, what’s up with the getup?”

Breathe. It’s just you specially modified suit with 3 knives hidden in it. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that usually girls on their first day come in looking like dolls, expecting to wow the king-in-waiting immediately.” That gets a laugh out of both of them. “And here you are dressed practical and professional except all those rings.”

(“Don’t give them any clues as to who you really are. We have a comprehensive story for Mariam, learn it. Your accent is too scattered for them to not believe you.”)

“You probably saw that I come from Wei, madam. It is a long, hard journey to here, but Auradon is the land of opportunity so I had to come. I bought this jewellery while working for a family in Corona. It is a good way to travel light when you don’t have much that is permanent. Keeping valuables close to me.” 

Tomiris can feel every breath that leaves her lungs, and she tries to control it. Inhale, one, two, three, four, exhale. The nervous tension sets in her body, deep in her bones, away from anyone’s eyes. 

“Well, that is smart.” 

Lu seems like she wants to say something more but they are interrupted by tea being brought in. 

***

A month passes uneventfully. Tomiris works the cleaning crew, makes nice with other staff and reports back to Silver Wings every three days. They tell her that the mission is going successfully, and that it is a long con, of course the progress is slow. But no matter what her superiors say, she is getting antsy. The High King was gone on political (and pleasure) trips almost all the time and she doesn’t know what she has to do to get noticed by him.

What she does know, however, is the schedule of the night guard around Beast’s rooms, and that he sleeps by a big window, and that she has a dagger that can stab through his heart. It’s taking all her will to just file this knowledge away, and not use it the first night after he comes back from a visit to Atlantea. 

***

Two weeks later, she is doing her morning trash sweep, and isn’t it rich? That her days are filled with taking trash out and swiping dust and making eyes at the Beast? She is a warrior, a master of both far-range weapons and close combat, an assassin, and here she is, knocking on the door of one of the offices: “May I come in?” What the hell, Tomiris doesn’t knock on doors, she comes in silently, without anyone hearing or seeing her. But Mariam knocks. And Mariam waits an appropriate amount of time to hear no answer and only then she makes her way in, dragging a cart behind her. Fuck. This whole extended mission thing is seriously messing with her mind. 

She gets to work on emptying the bin when she feels more than hears someone move behind her. Whipping her head around (and painfully hitting herself with the ends of her braids) she sees the King-in-waiting, Ben, in an armchair, confused, sleepy look on his face. How could she not have noticed him? 

“Good morning, your highness! I apologise, I didn’t notice you, I will be out in a second.”

“Good morning. Don’t worry, I shouldn’t have fallen asleep in here in the first place.” There is a slight smile on his face, which is odd. Why is he so friendly?

“Should I fetch someone to bring some breakfast, or coffee, your highness?” Tomiris has never really spoken with royalty, but she knows the protocol and it feels like the right thing to say. 

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get going soon. Just need to collect the papers.” It’s a good opportunity to see what he is doing. 

Tomiris is just done with the bins, so she takes off the gloves she wears to handle the trash and starts to help the King. “The Sidekicks Act”, “The Neverland colonies”, “The Moors Magic Negotiations”, all with bright red “Confidential” stamp on them. Tomiris can practically feel her blood pressure rising the more she thinks about each of them. “The Sidekicks act” is years in the making and it doesn’t seem like it will be enacted soon. Meanwhile, all the so-called sidekicks continue to work for free (there is a word for that). The cutting of the sacred forest in Neverland and the ban on magic in inherently magical places are such big issues that she can’t even bear to think about them for long. 

She passes the files to Ben without a word. 

“Oh thanks...uh?”

“Mariam, your highness.” She hopes that if he notices her voice quivering he assumes it’s nervousness, not rage. 

“Well, Mariam, thank you.” His smile is so genuine, it’s crazy that he is the son of the Beast King. “Oh, Gods, there is even more of them than I remember,” he mumbles.

Good, he isn’t all composed, still sleepy, maybe he will slip up and tell something that he wouldn’t otherwise. “Must be a heavy burden to be the High King-in-Waiting to Auradon.”

“With my father giving me more responsibilities and having to balance the needs of the people with our laws,” interestingly, that last part is said with some disdain, “it is hard to keep up. It’s as though I have the duties of the King with powers of a Prince.”

“I can’t even imagine.”

***

Tomiris is thinking about that meeting the whole day. There is a stark difference between father and son, and she can’t even begin to compare the two. Even the way they smile is different. 

She is dusting the table in the drawing room, while Julie is filling up the fireplace with wood, when King Beast comes in. 

“You, leave us.”

Tomiris could hope with everything in her that the King was talking to her, but she knows that he is addressing Julie. He wants to be alone with Mariam. And it’s good for the mission, right? All she did before was make eyes at him, now she has a chance at an actual conversation. 

She stays with her back turned to him, even after the door clicks shut behind Julie. She schools her face into a reverent expression and forces her breathing to slow down. 

His steps are heavy but quiet on the soft carpet. He sits down in the armchair right of the table she is dusting. 

He just watches her. 

“Did you want anything, your Majesty?” She intended it to sound conversational or flirty, but it is undercut with her voice breaking in the middle of the sentence.

“You could say so, Mariam.” He didn’t move to touch her yet. “I wanted to talk to you about my son and what happened this morning.”

That is definitely not the direction she saw this conversation go. It makes her freeze for a second, fearful that he knows she saw too much, before continuing to dust the already shining table. The King resumes his speech. 

“I have seen far too many young girls pretending to want to be employed by the Crown only to throw themselves at the King-in-Waiting at the first chance. He always turns them down, as he is utterly loyal to his betrothed, and they always quit. You seem to be a sensible girl, you know that honest work will get you more around here, right?”

She wants to laugh. Partially because he is so wrong about Benjamin, partially because honest work is the furthest from what she is doing here. It takes her a few moments to think of an answer, and when she does, Tomiris puts down her duster and finally looks Beast in the eyes. 

“You can not worry about that, your Majesty. I do not crave power. Or love of the King-in-Waiting.” She hopes that the enunciation on “in-waiting” combined with the suggestive look in her eyes it is enough of a hint. She can’t bring herself to say more. Tomiris turns and walks away to put the duster in the cart, which is in the corner to her left, when she hears the King stand up. 

“I see. You crave another’s love then?”

And isn’t that the winning question? It feels too real. Beast is taking small, deliberate steps towards her, like a predator stalking towards its prey. Her breath hitches, and she hopes he assumes its nervousness or excitement, not fear. 

“Perhaps I do, your majesty.”

She still doesn’t dare to turn to face him. He stands so close now that she can hear his breathing and feel his body heat, his figure obscuring most of the light from the window, leaving her in the shadows, in the dark. 

“Perhaps, then, he noticed you too.” His hands reach out to Tomiris’s arms. “Perhaps, you weren’t too sly at hiding your wants.” He pulls her closer to him, she stumbles as she takes a step back. ”Perhaps…” He doesn’t finish, just tugs on her hair to make her head turn to him and plants his lips on hers forcefully. 

***

It’s all a blur after that. Her clearest memory was at the end, when Beast said that he will excuse her for the rest of the day and move her to tending his personal rooms tomorrow. Tomiris knows he kissed her some more, recalls some comments on how she looked so interesting and different and how she was such a tease. At some point he loosened up both her braids so much so that she is redoing them now. 

She knows it didn’t go beyond kissing. She knows that if he had more than ten minutes with her, Beast would try for it.

She feels sick with herself. For this happening and for feeling that way when she knew going in that this would have to happen. That she signed up for that at all. She is a disgrace to the Huns (prideful, aggressive, undeceiving Huns). She should have known she wasn’t cut out for this deep cover shit. 

Tomiris can not push her morals down any more than this. She will not lay under the Beast. Even mere thought of that, with the ghost of his hands all over her makes bile rise up in her throat. 

But she can’t return to Silver Wings with nothing, they have already wasted months. 

The knowledge of the schedule of the guards, the Beast’s rooms is burning a hole in her brain. There is only one option now. She will have justice. Tomiris will free the people of the world from the burden of that beast as the most powerful figure.

She will kill him. Tonight.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tomiris is as sure that she wants King Beast dead as she is sure that she is breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tiktok voice “she’s alive!”
> 
> ok but for real the quarantine made me fall back into depressive episodes but I’m back and full of inspiration! 
> 
> check me out on tumblr @Lsleofthelost
> 
> Content warning for this chapter, check end notes.

As much as Tomiris wants to go and take Beast’s life as soon as she decides on it, she knows she must wait. What is a few hours compared to the two months she was undercover, to the three years she trained with Silver Wings, to the almost 10 years she hated that Beast? 

That doesn’t mean she idly sits in her chamber though. She has too much nervous energy for that. She packs her measly bag with plans of running to the emergency rendezvous point and unpacks them after realising that this will make her an immediate suspect. The palace has pictures of her, they will find and kill her. She will be a rat who betrayed the crown that housed and gave her a job, who was too cowardly to face the consequences in the eyes of the public. If she runs, the crown’s press managers will make her look a deranged villain, a danger to the public, she’s sure. 

But after the palace is free of the beast, Tomiris can wait out one more month. She is walking the length of her chamber back and forth thinking of a possible reason Mariam might want to quit. An argument? Could end with her transferred to a different department. A break up? Same problem plus she will need to fake a relationship before that. Shit. What else is there? She can have a relationship on the outside. Her handler from the Silver Wings. Mariam already sends letters to Linetta, a “friend from when she worked in Corona”. It’s not that much of a stretch to believe that their relationship changed and now Mariam wants to go back to Corona, with better money and resume, right? Yes, that will work. It will, it will. 

***

After cleaning up her story and her alibi (she will be seen getting a midnight snack and seemingly returning to her chamber), Tomiris feels the usual pre-mission calm wash over her. Thoughts are no longer running in circles in her head. All the details have been smoothed out. There is no more planning, the success depends only on her skill. And Tomiris is confident in that. 

She doesn’t have any moral objections to killing a sleeping man. If she did she would remember the crown's invasion of the Hun lands done in the darkest hours of the night. 

As the sky outside darkens and quiet descends on the castle, Tomiris begins to set up. First, she gets her weapons ready. The dagger that was dropped off in the city that she picked up on a weekend about three weeks in. With it she сuts the stitches inside of the big backpack she brought as all of Mariam’s belongings. In there is her equipment for emergencies: a black catsuit, made out of protective material similar to what the Auradon army uses and enchanted with a shielding spell, a matching thin black cape, enchanted with a notice-me-not spell. She loves that cape because it’s so easy to transport, it can’t be bigger than a wallet folded. The dagger and the cape go under the pillow for now. 

Tomiris changes into the suit and puts her nightgown over that. She unbraids her hair, messes it up a little and tugs on her under eye area a few times to make it look as if she woke up from a too-long nap. 

She checks her dagger’s sharpness one last time and straps it to her right thigh. She tugs at the sheets and crumples the duvet to the lower half of the bed. If anyone comes looking for Mariam, they’ll assume she went to the kitchens or the bathroom. 

Tomiris looks over to the clock on the wall: twenty to midnight. Perfect. She throws on a robe, stuffs her cape in a pocket and walks out of her room, phone flashlight on, acting half asleep. She is almost out of the maids’ quarters when the door to her right creaks open. 

“Who’s there?” A pause. “Mariam, is that you? What are you doing up so late?”

“Hey, Juls,” Tomiris sucks at voices, so she’s whispering, “I guess I fell asleep and missed dinner, so I’m just making a run to the kitchens for a midnight snack.”

“Oh, hon, I’ve got some crackers stored away in my room.” She has a sweet smile, Tomiris notes in that moment. There’s sympathy in her eyes, that is not proportional to the situation, though. “You want them?” 

“I couldn’t. I’d have to go to the kitchens either way, I need to get some water.” 

“Suit yourself. Ooh, would you mind getting me a bottle?”

This is better than anything Tomiris hoped for. Julie will vouch for her. 

“Of course not! I’ll be back in...fifteen?”

“Just knock when you’re back, honey. I went down this rabbit hole of Prince Chadwick’s interviews, I won’t be asleep. He’s so charming!”

***

Tomiris is on the staircase from where ways to the kitchens and to the kingly rooms split up. She walks into a shaded corner to change. The robe and the nightgown come off, the hair is thrown into a tight bun and the cape is on her in less than thirty seconds. Tomiris feels like herself at last.

You can never be too careful with the tracking abilities of a phone so she’s leaving it all here, tucked near the plant pot infamous for being a weed drop off point. She checks the time and starts a mental clock. Nine forty-seven. About three minutes until the guards change shifts. 

She walks up the stairs and ducks into the servants corridors. Two and a half minutes. Straight through the corridor, up a flight of stairs. One and a half minutes. Left and she’s there. One minute until the guards change shifts and create enough noise so that the sound of the servants’ door opening won’t be heard. 

Tomiris takes her dagger out and looks at her own reflection in the weak light. With the hood on, she can barely see her own face. Tomiris lowers the weapon, feels the carving in the handle. Small geometric pattern, representing ram’s horn. Power, perseverance and life force. So much hunnic wisdom is lost now that they are all being raised in Weian culture. 

Her thoughts are interrupted by the faint sound of footsteps. Guard change. Tomiris carefully pushes the door open. There he is. Sleeping on his gigantic four poster bed while the dwarves who probably mined all the precious stones for the lavish decoration barely make the ends meet. 

She walks up to his side, careful not to make a sound. (Though she’d have to try, the carpet underneath the bed is so plush, one could probably drop a bowling ball unheard.) She doesn’t have all night. In a fluid and powerful move she raises her dagger and thrusts it in his chest. 

It doesn’t go through. It does not fucking go through. Tomiris is sure that she hit the perfect spot between fourth and fifth rib. Her blade is sharp and true. Why the fuck did it not go through? She tries again. It just grazes him. 

Before she can try again, she feels a strong hand on her wrist. 

“Guards!”, a guttural, angry voice howls. 

The double doors open and four men run in. Tomiris tries to move, to run, but the king still possesses beastly strength. She kicks him in the side and twists away. Tomiris goes to stab the guard closest to her and gets him somewhere in the abdomen. Punches another. With the dagger still bloody she aims for the third's eye but only gets his face. She can’t see the fourth one. Where is he? A fist connects with her throat, making all thought fly away. 

There’s a harsh and powerful tug at her cape and she loses balance, falls down on her right side, dagger clattering to the ground. There’s the fourth one. She tries to get up but someone puts their knee on her back. They are quick to put her hands behind her back and in cuffs. 

***

This is the worst night of her life. She felt so triumphant only twenty minutes ago and now she failed. Oh gods, she failed. What is she going to do? What are they going to do to her? She can’t believe she failed. She can’t believe she went so hard against the plan. 

Tomiris is in cuffs, chained to the iron table, her dagger just out of reach in front of her. There are three armed guards lining the back wall. The Beast is the other room, probably with some midnight council. 

She is such a loser. Tomiris wanted to save her people but now she’ll be the cause of their demonisation. She’ll be another scary story of why you can’t trust foreigners. Like Jafar (all brown men are power hungry pedophiles) or Regina (all latinas are gold digging witches) or Gothel (all Jewish people are hoarding power and practicing blood libel). She’ll be a caricature of her people. Tomiris (all Huns are savages who are just waiting to kill you under the cover of night). She wants to bang her head on the table. 

That won’t be necessary though. Soon her head will roll. That’s the harsh truth, right? She failed and now they are going to kill her. Oh, they are going to torture her and then kill her. 

Before she can go any further down this train of thought, the only door in the room opens. 

It’s the High Queen, Belle de Villeneuve. She’s beautiful and so neatly put together that one could think she was prepared for this. She doesn’t lose her composure when her eyes catch the dagger, dried blood covering the blade, but something changes in her face when she looks up at Tomiris. Maybe it’s the shock of seeing someone beat up, maybe it’s recognition. Whatever it is, her eyes become unfocused, like she isn’t mentally here. 

After a couple of moments, High King Adam follows in, with a man in a suit, some lawyer type. He doesn’t look like he’s there to beat information out of her, he looks like he bumps cocaine on the daily.

“Hello, Mariam,” he talks slowly, “ We aren’t quite sure if that is your real name but it should suffice for the time. Now, I have been made aware by his majesty the High King of your actions.” With a metallic thud, he lowers a briefcase she didn’t notice he was holding. 

“We hope you are going to cooperate.” Click. The locks on the briefcase open. “That would be better for all parties involved.” Thud. One half lowers on the table. 

“We’ll start with basics. Who do you work for?”

She finally looks him in the eyes. They’re blue, cold but ultimately average. “Like I’d tell you.” 

“Well, that was expected. Your Highnesses, as the perpetrator is not cooperating, I will be conducting the interrogation as previously discussed.” The man looks over his shoulders for confirmation. 

The Beast has the look of utter concentration, eyes focused on Tomiris, as if he can read her mind. The Queen still looks a little out of it, but both nod. 

Lawyer-looking man, her interrogator, reaches inside the briefcase. Instead of knives, needles or other torture devices Tomiris expected, he pulls out a small vial of orange-ish liquid. 

“What the fuck is that?” Words tumble out of her mouth before she can control it. 

The man ignores her, speaking to the guards instead, instructing them to hold “Mariam” down and push her face upwards. One of them comes up behind her chair and put one hand on her shoulder. With the other, he grabs her underneath the jaw and forces her to look up. 

It’s terrifying. She can’t see anything but the ceiling. Tomiris tries to fight, moves her body chaotically, turns her head. There isn’t much she can do, cuffed and held down as she is. To her left she sees the interrogator. “No, wait, what is that? What are you doing?”

With a put upon sigh, the man stops near her. “This is something that the High Queen herself has invented. You will see the effects soon enough.” He looks to the guard holding her head. “Keep her steady.”

The hold tightens. She almost feels like she’s being choked. Something cold drops into her left eye. She tries to blink it out but it’s stuck uncomfortably, covering her eyeball like a wrapper. More of the liquid is being poured around her right eye. The fast blinks don’t let the drops hit their mark. But soon enough a hand reaches down and forcibly opens her eye. 

Fuck, it burns. She’s sure she’s crying. Is their first move really to burn off both her eyes? What the shit?!

An unexpected voice speaks up. “Miss Mariam, don’t be absurd. We are not barbarians. This solution will simply make you more pliable to the questioning.” The Queen sounds hoarse, like this is the first time she spoke in a while. 

Somewhere between all the movement, the hands holding Tomiris disappeared. So she straightens up. Everything is blurry and unsteady so she just looks in the Queen’s approximate direction. 

“I don’t know who drained your empathy, Queen Belle the Kind, but your intelligence means nothing without it.”

The last thing Tomiris hears before she passes out is a small gasp. 

***

When she comes to, she’s sitting on the floor of what she assumes is the same room. Except now, she has her cloak on and when she blinks the post black bleariness out of her eyes, she finds her dagger strapped against her leg again, miraculously clean. She makes a move to stand up and falls right back. Her forearms are bound against her back. Her feet are cuffed together so closely, she’d probably fall if she tried to walk. 

Tomiris makes an attempt to move again. Anything is better than to be sitting here in the deafening silence. The only sound in the room is her own shallow breathing. But when she tries to push the chair back, make some room for herself, a wave of nausea overcomes her. Something wants to come up. Tomiris instinctively turns to the side so she won’t get vomit on herself. Her stomach is achingly empty and she can only retch that emptiness. 

When the nausea lessens (because it doesn’t pass, not completely) she straightens up and notices something move out the corner of her eye. She flinches before realising it is her own reflection. Fuck, she looks awful. 

The double braids no longer tight against her head, disheveled beyond recognition. Hair plastered to her face with sweat. Hand marks around her throat. Tear tracks on her cheeks, so many of them, she thinks there must be enough salt dried on her cheeks for a lake. And her eyes. Bloodshot, still with the orange tint, irises blown. 

She reminds herself of her neighbour from when they were living in Schwarzwald. They had no choice but to stay in questionable places and the man across from her and her dad was a notorious drug addict. He was fine usually, never bothered them, but one time she found him passed out right in front of his door, no strength left in him to get across the porch. Tomiris took the keys from him and let him inside. He fell on the couch. Trying to help, she brought him a glass of water. He drank it gratefully. When they sat down, she got a better look at him. He was frazzled, shaking a little, sweaty, his eyes were red. Stuttering, he told her that his name was Franz and that he was trying to quit. There are no programs that would accept someone hooked on ambrosia, he said, that shit is too heavily associated with the fae. So he’d gone cold turkey and hoped for the best. She sat with him for a while, that day and everyday before they left. Franz was the one who told her about Silver Wings. (“It’s not like you can grow up neighboring the fae district and not know some secrets, Tomi.”) He was just starting to get a little better when her dad said they had to move. Tomiris didn’t even get to say goodbye. 

She never got to say goodbye to anyone she befriended. She won’t get to say goodbye to anyone now. Like Julie. They didn’t know each other that well but they worked together and took their breaks together and Tomiris had a soft spot dangerously close to her heart for Julie. 

Tomiris makes a few more attempts at breaking out of the bonds even though she knows it’s meaningless. Soon, she will be killed for high treason against the crown and two of her souls will leave her body. Amin ruhu will no longer power her body. Sulde ruhu, her personality, will return to nature. Only her sunesun ruhu has hopes of reincarnation. She prays it will go to someone who is free, and not get sent to the Isle of the Lost. 

She doesn’t know how much time passes before the door opens. Two unidentifiable guards stand on the threshold. The shorter one comes up and kneels next to her chair. He fiddles with her feet cuffs and the chain elongates. He stands up and moves behind her. Tomiris thinks he might soften the bounds on her arms but he doesn’t. 

“Stand up, Mariam of the huns,” the other guard barks. He still calls her by the fake name. 

***

They guide her through the corridors and up and up the stairs. Just how deep underground were they holding her? 

When they finally come to the surface, Tomiris sees the pitch black sky through the windows. It can’t be earlier than three in the morning. That’s the moment alarms begin blaring in her head. If they were going to execute her, wouldn’t they do it the old-fashioned way? On the main square, in front of witnesses? She tries asking the guards but they are all stony faces and silence. 

Finally, they stop. The taller guard presses some buttons close to a door that’s identical to others they passed and stands back. Her legs are shaking. She keeps repeating her prayers. 

The door swings open to reveal a garage of identical cars belonging to the crown. Holding the door is her interrogator. He is holding a backpack, which Tomiris recognised as her own. He looks her over. Seemingly satisfied with what he’s seeing, he nods. She is so confused. A tiny flame of hope lights up in her chest before she can squash it. Maybe he is one of Silver Wings deep undercover agents. Maybe he will help her. Maybe she will run away and live. 

“Hello again, Mariam,” he talks slowly again, but this time there are notes of exhaustion in his voice. “I am here as a representative of the High King Adam de Villeneuve of the United Kingdoms of Auradon.” The warm hope Tomiris had for a second dies. She is left with once again trembling legs and a ringing in her ears. She can barely hear the rest of his speech. 

“For your crimes of involvement with the terrorist organisation Silver Wings, murder of Luther Smith, conspiracy against the crown, high treason against the crown and attempted assassination of High King Adam de Villeneuve you are sentenced to,” public execution via guillotine, “banishment on the Isle of the Lost.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for discussion of killing for the whole chapter.  
> Minor spoilers: description of physical violence in section three,  
> mention of drugs in section four in paragraph that begins with “After a couple of moments”,  
> mentions of drug addiction in section five, skip the paragraph that starts with “She reminds herself of her neighbour”.
> 
> Let me know if I missed anything.
> 
> check me out on tumblr @Lsleofthelost
> 
> Please tell me your thoughts in the comments! luv u all ♡

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for unwanted sexual attention in section four. Skip from paragraph that starts “And isn’t that the winning question” until paragraph in section five that starts with “But she can’t return to”.   
> Summary, Beast kisses Tomiris, because he believes she wants it. She suffers through it for the sake of the mission. Later, she is angry at herself for that happening.
> 
> The first couple of chapters will be centred on Tomiris, to establish her a little before we get into action. 
> 
> Please comment! What do you think of Tomiris, her motivations and actions so far? 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr @Lsleofthelost


End file.
